First, a moment of xen. Err… Zen:
Now with the tone and mood set, turn your attention please to the hardening tone of the conversation around facebook’s beacon.
PCWorld made a play for more attention by re-rolling their previous story, this time focusing on the potential that beacon has for harvesting data from people who don’t even have facebook accounts‽ Fortunately this article points to another good CA blog post, which includes the now-well-traveled blocksite plugin method of defeating beacon.
A fellow who blogs for fortune seems to have gotten just as angry as I did. He goes so far as to predict its demise. I don’t know about that, but he’s definitely right that the story has legs, and none of the reporting is positive. At best it’s guardedly quizzical, at worst it’s cheering on facebook’s demise. Worse still, it’s more than one narrative, each independently bad. Let’s count them. There’s the “this beacon thing isn’t smart advertising” narrative, the “this beacon thing is another privacy trainwreck” narrative, the “facebook is really fumbling this rollout” narrative, the “facebook is suing people in dumb ways unrelated to beacon but at the same time” narrative, and last but not least, the “if beacon is what they can come up with, then facebook is definitely overvalued” narrative. Did I miss any?
The only thing all of this consistently comes back to is hubris. I’m definitely not the only one who thinks that Zuckerberg isn’t a good leader. Perhaps it’s groupthink at facebook HQ?
So here’s a ‘leaving facebook’ PSA: if you want to leave facebook, make sure you delete all your wall posts, remove all applications, leave all groups, remove all friends, and delete all facebook messages. The facebook people won’t do that for you. If you contact their customer support and tell them you want all your data purged, they’ll tell you to log in and delete it yourself. So! You’ve purged your data, right? Now you can go and disable your account. This is an utterly meaningless action, since undoing it is as simple as logging back in. But you did that step too, right? Now you can contact facebook support and tell them you want your account purged. Email them at privacy@facebook.com Believe me, it’s worth it. What comes after facebook will be better.
Moving on, what will life after facebook look like? Well, who are you and why were you using facebook? If you’re lazy, bought into ’social utility’ line, and don’t mind Russian overlords: livejournal. Came for the profiles? MySpace. Used facebook to organize parties? socializr. Facebook didn’t do any of these gracefully. We are the ones we have been waiting for. If the existing tools don’t facilitate social interaction the way we’d like, let’s build them. You’ll pardon me if I focus on details like database storage and encoding issues, I hope. I’ll leave the engineering of new systems to others.
There may be more facebook/beacon news in the near future. I’m calling it quits on talking about it, though. If I haven’t convinced you by now that you should leave, likely I won’t, and putting more energy into this would be a waste.
